Progress Report #4

Hello!

You might've noticed that this progress report is nearly two weeks late, or we simply skipped one, depending on how you look at it. Simply put, May was a busy month for my family, and between now and the previous progress report, there was a graduation, a marriage, and a birth, two of which I was required to travel out of town to attend. Additionally, I also ran into a pretty big issue (now resolved) involving an unintended Unity update that horrendously broke my shaders and shadows even after downgrading and reverting to a pre-update backup. Sadly, all of this cut into development time significantly, but with a lack of scheduled interruptions until November, updates should resume their once-every-two-weeks schedule!

Gameplay:

• Enemies can now be grabbed
• Enemies can now respawn
• Objects can spawn in the foreground/background before moving to the path
• Game can now be paused!! woawh
• There is now some leeway with certain inputs, most notably jumping and attacking. For example, if you press the jump button a couple frames before touching the ground, Puro will still jump. This also fixed certain inputs randomly being dropped.
• Added basic control customization, mostly allowing the few buttons the game has to be swapped, and allowing players to swap Confirm/Cancel without changing which buttons are jump and attack. 
• Objects that track other objects (such as the Snapper following you) no longer get confused on loops 

Polish:

• Weapons now have nice trails when swung, for better readability
• Grabbing things now accompanied by a visual effect
• Pausing the game applies a lowpass filter to the audio and blurs the game

Back-End:

• Significant improvements to pathfinding, or rather, the ability for an object to track another while on the same path
• Completely overhauled how inputs are coded, to prepare for implementing different controller support and customizable controls!!

Fixes:

• Turns out unity doesn't like when you let Maya handle scale offsetting automatically. OOPS
• Spent about an ENTIRE WEEK fixing a bizarre problem involving a failed Unity update that broke the shadows in the game very badly. It's fixed now.

Currently testing:

• Menus
• Fully customizable controls!
• NPC DIALOGUE

In any event, I deeply apologize for the delay and any future changes I might have to make because of it, but as always, thank you so, so much for your support!